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User blog:LociOiling/Hello from wikiland
I'm still having fun trying to whip this wiki into shape. Thanks to spmm for granting me and Paul Dunn additional rights. We now rule this wiki with an iron fist. (Technically, Paul has the iron fist, while I have heavy-duty rubber gloves and a large pair of tweezers. Let me know if you need something tweezed.) Part of the fun has been taking pictures of proteins, which is a lot easier in Foldit than in real life. I noticed that screen shots with a light background have a faint yellow cast, and figured out how to adjust the window background to fix it. My camera is trusty Paint Shop Pro (PSP), a venerable not-free but not-too-expensive product. It can also fix backgrounds, but it's easier to get them right from the start. I've also been trying to develop a theory of wikiology. I'm trying to see the wiki from the point of view of a new player. What would I want to see, and how would I go about finding it? Part of the effort is to make sure all the buzzwords that pop up in Folditland have their own wiki page. For example, I added a pages for Update Group and Isosurface. I've been adding the categories "Biochemistry" and "Glossary" to many new and updated pages, which may make them easier to find. I've also tried to streamline some of the terminology, and make it more consistent between Foldit and the wiki. I'm gradually changing "alpha helix" and "beta sheet" to just "helix" and "sheet". (And yeah, "beta strand" means "sheet", too.) There's similar issue for "glutamic acid", a.k.a. "glutamate", and "aspartic acid", which uses the screen name "aspartate" in Foldit. Disambiguation is my business. I'm trying to play up the relevance of each term in Foldit. I've tended to push the gory details down the page a bit, adding a "Chemistry" heading in a few cases. Speaking of headings, some existing pages start with a table of contents. I've tried to add opening paragraphs instead, since this seems more readable to me. (Also, it's really not necessary to start with a heading that has basically the same name as the page.) On the new page front, I found a simple workaround to a wiki problem. When you add a new page, you're automatically placed in the "new" editor, which is horrible. For one thing, I haven't been able to add images from this editor; it's image upload tool seem broken. The solution is simple -- just click "cancel". You end up on the "create" page for the page you're trying to add. Just use the dropdown on the "Create" button to select the "classic editor". This is basically the same as when you edit an existing page. This workaround has eliminated the need to revisit a new page using the classic editor to add images and fine-tune the layout. That's enough! This is getting too bloggy! LociOiling (talk) 22:00, February 22, 2017 (UTC) Category:Blog posts